Will Unicode Soon Be the Universal Code?

KEY: UTF-8: UCS Transformation Format-8; ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange; 1252: Windows-1252, also known as CP-1252 and latin1 (Microsoft); GB2312: Guojia Biaozhun, which means “national standard” in Chinese; SJIS (or Shift Japanese International Standard): JIS X 0208 Appendix 1; 1251: Windows-1251; EUC-KR: Extended Unix Code-Korean; Source: Mark Davis Click on image to enlarge. Click on the image to enlarge. A universal human language, though appealing in theory, has never gained much traction in real life. French, Chinese, and Arabic have served as lingua francas at one time or another, but almost no one is fluent in Esperanto , the global linguistic mash-up. In computing, on the other hand, a universal way of encoding languages—that is, translating characters from any language into ones and zeros and vice versa—has been steadily growing since 2...